April 19th, 2nd update by Gunnar

Quake Demos
Nolan made three demos from SoA:

• Easy 100% hip3m1 in 1:54, with lot's of rocketjumps, even a quad one.
• Easy hip3m2 100% in 2:13, only nine seconds slower than his nightmare run on this level.
• Easy hip3m2 in 0:39, watch his cool trick =)

Quake Coop Demos
Attila Csernyik and Peter Horvath made quite a few coop demos:

• Easy e1m1 in 0:25, improves it with one second, using a new bridge trick.
• Easy e2m1 in 0:09
• Easy e3m1 in 0:27, three second improvement with a variation of the ssg trick.
• Easy e4m1 in 0:25
• Easy end in 0:31

Quake Coop Demo Names
The rules for naming coop runs are as follows:

• The first person (server) uses the ' _ ' as in all other demos.
• The second uses an 'a', the third a 'b', and so on.
• The text-file and the zip-file should also use a ' _ '.

If you're still confused, download a coop demo and check. Please try to follow these rules, as it'll save us a lot of renaming. Thanks, and keep those demos coming.

April 19th by Tangent

Bunny-Hopping is Banned
After discussing with Muad'Dib and Radix, we have decided to ban Bunny-Hopping in the Quake II runs on Speed Demos Archive. The very simple reason is that we do not want every single SDA demo to be made up of bunny hops from the start to the end. Zigzagging isn't that big a problem in Quake 1 because the differences are that significant due to timings being accurate to the second. However, with the timings being accurate to 0.1 second on Quake II runs, everyone will be bunny hopping to lose every 0.1 second they can. Not something we would like to see.

We regret to have to reject a few demos sent in for this update which featured bunny-hopping. We have also removed Charlie Tran's base1_13.1 from the table too. Please do not try to send in any more demos featuring bunny-hopping. We can detect bunny-hopping easily and will not accept them. SDA will be the judge on what is considered bunny-hopping for any demos submitted to us.

We will hopefully go into detail soon on "just what the heck is bunny-hopping anyway", and what is considered acceptable and unacceptable.

Quake 1 Demos
I've finally(finally!? you asked me once, and I said yes. What Gerald is suggesting here ladies(?) and gentlemen, is that I'm a bit lazy. Which is absolutely correct, but he can shove his sarcastic comments up where the quad don't shine - Gunnar =) convinced Muad'Dib to take over updating of the Quake 1 demos. Woohoo!

Quake II Demos
We start off with the usual base1 updates. Besides having sent in 12.9 for both easy and hard runs using bunny-hopping, Will Marsh managed to do some good runs for both without the bunny-hopping.

• Easy base1 in 0:13.3 by Will Marsh, 0.1 seconds better than Paolo's previous record.
• Hard base1 in 0:13.2 by Will Marsh
• Easy 100% base1 in 1:13.6 by Ian Sutton, 3.1 seconds better than Evan's previous record
• Hard 100% base1 in 1:16.7 by Optic, 2.8 seconds better than Ian's previous record

Optic sent a lot of demos (many of them really short), as usual:

• Easy base2a in 0:18.7, 1.6 seconds faster than Paolo's previous record
• Easy base3 in 0:50.6, 17.7 seconds faster than Mugwum's previous record
• Hard base3 in 1:00.2
• Easy mine3c in 0:07.5, 0.3 seconds faster than Will's previous record.
• Hard mine3c in 0:07.5, 0.4 seconds faster than Will's previous record. Fredrik Arvidsson sent in a 0:07.5 too, but I received Optic's first.
• Easy fact1b in 0:10.1
• Hard fact1b in 0:10.2
• Easy hangar1b in 0:06.5
• Hard hangar1b in 0:06.6
• Easy biggun in 0:38.1
• Hard biggun in 0:38.4, 1.2 seconds faster than Yonatan's previous record

Newcomer David Huang sends in his first 2 demos:

• Easy hangar1a in 0:09.8, beating Will's previous record by 0.3 seconds
• Hard hangar1a in 0:09.8, beating Will's previous record by 0.1 seconds

Besides base1, Ian Sutton did another 100% demo:

• Easy 100% jail1 in 2:06.4

Demo Removal
I had to remove Paolo Petrini's 2 demos from jail3b because he did not start with the correct stats (i.e. he did not start using "exec jail3b"). The records both return to Optic.

April 18th by Tangent

Hard vs Hard+
Yes, we are very aware that there is a skill 3 (also known as Hard+, but some still call it Nightmare as with the Doom/Quake tradition) in Quake II. However, we chose to ignore skill 3 and run in skill 2 due to reasons best explained in this page. We have also decided that we will not accept any skill 3 demos into the skill 2 tables, for the simple reason that they are different. It is also unlikely that we will open another section for skill 3 demos.

Quake 1 Demos
None for today. Come on guys, give Quake 1 a chance!

Quake II Demos
The base1 contest has not yet ended, with 2 hot demos:

• Hard base1 in 0:13.1 by Charlie Tran, 0.5 seconds faster than Will Marsh's previous record!
• Hard 100% base1 in 1:19.5 by Ian Suttan, 11.0 seconds faster than Stuart McCabe's previous record!

Apologies to Yonatan Donner for misplacing his 2 hard biggun demos he sent 3 days earlier. Here they are:

• Hard biggun in 0:39.6, 2.6 seconds faster than his own previous record.
• Hard 100% biggun in 0:43.5

Will Marsh did a few really short demos:

• Easy hangar1a in 0:10.1
• Hard hangar1a in 0:09.9
• Easy mine3c in 0:07.8, taking the hint I dropped in my comments yesterday :)
• Hard mine3c in 0:07.9

Optic did a lot of short demos on jail too:

• Easy jail2b in 0:45.5
• Hard jail2b in 0:45.7
• Easy jail3c in 0:16.0
• Hard jail3c in 0:16.0
• Easy jail3d in 0:20.7
• Hard jail3d in 0:20.8
• Easy mine3b in 0:22.7
• Hard mine3b in 0:22.5
• Easy mine4 in 0:43.0
• Hard mine4 in 0:42.9

Paul Alexander got 1 demo in:

• Easy fact1a in 0:09.8, beating my previous record by 0.9 seconds

Paolo Petrini managed a few demos:

• Easy base2a in 0:20.3, beating his own previous record by 0.3 seconds
• Easy jail3b in 0:14.4, beating Optic's previous record by 0.7 seconds. Paul Alexander sent in a 0:14.4 too, but I received Paolo's first.
• Hard jail3b in 0:14.8, beating Optic's previous record by 0.5 seconds.

Mugwum sends in his first demo:

• Easy base3 in 1:08.3

Comments
This took longer than I expected, as demos kept coming in even as I was updating. I had to put a stop to it and tell myself not to accept any more new demos while I update. They can wait for tommorrow's update. 4:30am local Singapore time now (It's the 19th already.. geez!), time for me to sleep. I was hoping to a bit of this book I just bought, The Rainmaker by John Grisham (loved the movie, so I bought the book). But I have to wake up at 8am for a TF clan match (scheduled in US time, naturally), so it's off to bed for me.

April 17th by Tangent

Please Send Your Demos To The Correct Address
The correct place to send your demo to is sda@planetquake.com, and not to qdq@planetquake.com. Although SDA and QdQ are quite similar, they are 2 different speed running projects. QdQ concentrates on full-episode runs, while SDA works on single map runs.

Info & Rules Page Updated
As promised yesterday, the Info & Rules Page have been updated. I have reorganised the instructions for watching/recording/sending Quake II demos. They should be much more easier to understand. I hope this will decrease the number of e-mails to us asking for help :) There will be more updates to the Info & Rules Pages in the near future. I did not do everything which I wanted to do since I'm rushing to get this news update out before my clan's Q2 CTF practice...

Original Quake Demos
Oh yes, we do have one Quake demo today, and it improves a demo from the qdqlite project

• Easy e1m2 in :34 by Gunnar André Mo, 1 second faster than Stefan Schwoon's previous record.

Quake II Demos
The fighting for the best times in base1 have not yet ended. A lot of people sent in demos for base1, and these are the ones which made it on top:

• Hard base1 in 0:13.6 by Will Marsh, beating Yonatan Donner's previous record by 0.1 seconds. Charlie Tran sent in a his own 0:13.6 too, but unfortunately, I received Will's demo first.
• Easy 100% base1 in 1:16.7 by Evan Wagner.
• Hard 100% base1 in 1:30.5 by Stuart McCabe, inproving his own record by 1.6 seconds and fending off a lot of stiff competition from 4 other runners.

Another map which witnessed some competition is jail2a, and Optic (Justin Fleck) came up on top for both easy and hard. Optic also made a few other short demos.

• Hard base2a in 0:20.6
• Easy jail2a in 0:31.5, beating Jesse van Dijk's previous record by 1.8 seconds
• Hard jail2a in 0:31.2
• Easy jail3a in 0:21.5
• Hard jail3a in 0:22.6
• Easy mintro in 0:25.2, good grenade-barrel jump there
• Hard mintro in 0:25.7

Besides his new base1 record, Will Marsh adds one more under his name.

• Hard boss1 in 0:55.5

As for myself, itching to do some grenade jumps, I chose 4 maps which offers grenade jump oppurtunities.

• Easy bunk1a in 0:25.4 using 1 grenade jump
• Easy ware2 in 1:12.9 using 3 grenade jumps (and no powercubes)
• Easy mine1 in 0:59.4 using a rocket+grenade jump
• Easy waste1a in 0:30.0 using another rocket+grenade jump

New Version of q2timer Soon
Yes, we know that q2timer does not yet record multiplayer co-op demos properly. So Radix made me stay up until 5am Singapore time (5pm in his own Eastern time) to help him test his changes to q2timer. It wasn't so fun for me playing at 800 ping either, with both of us on analog modems and on opposite ends of the World. Fortunately, client-side prediction in Quake II saved the day, and it is still much better than playing Quake with 400+ ping. Wished Quake II does client-side monster prediction though. So far, these have been done:

• Pause. Quake II doesn't allow pausing in multiplayer games, so Radix had to hack in his own pause into q2timer so the host player can wait for the client players to connect first before starting the run.
• Intermission for client players have been fixed.

We tried to record a multiplayer co-op run on security, and managed to get a time of 57 seconds, but unfortunately the demos didn't turn up well. Radix's demos couldn't be played back (error: map differs from local map), and mine always gets cut right after Big Tank dies due to message overflow. So it's back to the drawing board for Radix.

Comments
Each update has been taking me like 3 hours a day. Not good. But I guess this has to be expected with the many demos coming in to fill the blanks. Hopefully, this won't be so bad when all the blanks are filled (and then the Q2 mission pack comes out.. aaarrrggghhhhh!). Gunnar has been refusing to run Quake II until he gets his Voodoo2 card. Well, he'd better get it fast and help Radix and I with the updating.

It seems that everyone is trying to "snap up" the short and simple levels in Quake 2. Hint: mine3c is still up for grabs! Hopefully, we can get rid of those levels quick and get into some level runs which require skillz. Oh yeah, don't forget to check out the 4 levels I did with grenade jumps.

April 16th by Tangent

Info & Rules
Please read the Info & Rules carefully before attempting any runs for submission to us. We have received quite a few good demos which we are unable to accept because they did not follow the rules. The common mistakes are:

1. Not using the required q2cfg pak to start the map.
2. Not completing the required goals for the particular as stated in the goals.txt (which found in the q2cfg pak)
3. Not including a text file that shows the level, kills/secrets and your comments. We recommend that you use the example text file as a template.

The Info & Rules page will be updated soon with more detail, and hopefully it should be easier to understand.

Problems with .cfg
A few people have reported having problems using the the .cfg, with Quake II reporting an error "You must be in a level to record" and not recording when they exec the .cfg and start running the map. The simple solution to this problem is to exec the .cfg again. You should have bound a key to "exec [mapname].cfg". Very often, the first time you press the bound key to start the map and to record, you will get the error and the map will start without recording (You can take the oppourtunity to do a "precache" here). Simply press the bound key again and you should be recording fine. If you're still having problems, please report them to us.

Start-From-Scratch Quake II Runs
Quite a few people have sent in start-from-scratch demos instead of using the q2cfg pak which gives the players some weapons, items and ammo when starting the later maps. We are unable to accept those demos, but don't throw them away yet. We will soon be opening another section for Start-From-Scratch runs, and maybe even Start-From-Scratch 100%s. It is certainly going to be more challenging and will please the fans of the original Quake speed runs. Imagine having to kill Makron with a blaster :)

Changes in q2cfg and goals.txt
The goals.txt in the q2cfg pak has been updated. If you have the previous q2cfg pak, you do not need to upgrade. But just take note of the following changes in the goals.txt:

1. mine3a: Lower the acess bridge and exit to mine2, but not at where you entered.
2. command: Get to strike

No real difference in command, but in mine3a, that means you can't rocket jump back up to the exit which you started the map from.

Quake II demos
base1 has remained very competitive:

• Paolo Petrini did easy base1 in 0:13.4, beating BurninSun's previous record by 0.1 seconds.
• Stuart McCabe did 100% hard base1 in 1:32.1, beating Yonatan Donner's previous record by 2.1 seconds.

A few short demos by Justin Fleck. Notice he did jail1 0.3 seconds faster on hard than on easy :)

• Easy base2b in 0:17.4
• Hard base2b in 0:17.7
• Easy jail1 in 0:35.3
• Hard jail1 in 0:35.0
• Easy jail3b in 0:15.1
• Hard jail3b in 0:15.3

Besides his good base1 run, Paolo Petrini did one more on base2:

• Easy base2a in 0:20.6

Jesse van Dijk gets in his first run:

• Easy jail2a in 0:33.3

Original Quake demos
Nope, none in today, unfortunately.

Comments
Whew.. this is way more work than previously when updating Muad'Dib's Quake Page. Having to deal with Quake II and hard/nightmare means quadruple the work. The long filenames, multiple demo directories and linking to the Planetquake Download Center are real headaches though.

We're starting to see the Quake II runs beginning to fill up. And I hope we can fill them up fast first and then start competitive running on each map. Original Quake runs are unfortunately on the decline, mostly because of the new found interests in Quake II speed-running, and that most of the Quake maps are either optimised or almost optimised, and it is very hard to improve them further by a full second. With the timing in Quake II now taken to 0.1 of a second, we may never see an end to the improvements.

April 15th by Radix

base1
After having our mailbox spammed with base1 demos ranging from 14 seconds to 18 seconds, we decided it's best to update as fast as possible before we get anymore. Anyway, the records go to BurninSun for easy with 13.5 and Yonatan for hard with 13.7, both of which were made for Q2dQ2 right after q2timer was released and before SDA opened... There are a lot of other choices on the q2 page...

Quake II demos
Speaking of those choices, Tangent did some:

• fact1a in 10.7 on both easy and hard skills.
• power1 in 17.2 on easy and 18.4 on hard.
• command in 30.9 on easy and 40.2 on hard.

and I did some:

• bunk1b in 27.3 on easy.
• power2c in 20.9 on easy.
• strike in 1:02.3 on hard.

Yonatan also did some...

• biggun in 42.2 on hard.
• the first Quake II 100% demo: base1 on hard in 1:34.2.
• and the first whole unit Quake II run: the base unit in 2:15.2.

Quake demos
Back to Quake demos... I improved both 100%s of e3m4:

• 32 seconds faster on nightmare to get 1:48.
• and six seconds faster on easy to get 1:40.

Justin did a new 100% demo:

• h2m5 on easy in 1:39, two minutes and 16 seconds faster than the nightmare 100%.

Gunnar spent three hours improving the easy run of e1m7:

• he improved it by one second to get :18.

Other maps
Last year, I did three nightmare 100% demos on user map levels, either by the author's request or as a challenge. I never posted them to NSD though... Over the last two days, I did easy 100% demos on the same levels, and now I'm going to post them all:

• For The Elektra Complex, I got 2:21 on nightmare and 1:25 on easy.
• On Carnage, I got 2:47 on nightmare and 1:51 on easy.
• And on Homecoming, I got 6:15 on nightmare and 2:53 on easy.

Those are all great maps, not just according to me, but also the many map review sites that there are.
Ever make a speed demo on a map that is not listed here? Send it in and we will post it...

April 12th by Radix

Welcome to Speed Demos Archive!
This new page is a combination of my old Nightmare Speed Demos page and Gunnar André Mo's skill 0 page. If you've never been to either of those pages, and you've never seen any of the Quake done Quick demos, then you should go to the info & rules page to see what this page is about...

Quake II demos
I finished the q2timer patch that I started a long time ago, so a Quake II section has been added. Quake II demos are much different from Quake demos, so even if you regullary went to the old pages, you will have to go to the info & rules page to read about Quake II demos if you want to do them. To start out, I did a run of boss2 on hard, in :53.2.

Quake will live on
Don't think that because we can now speed run Quake II that Quake speed running is dead. I'll still make some, and I'll bet some others will too. We also have a lot of new Quake demos that we haven't posted to our respective pages, so we could have a big opening for SDA. Here they are:

Lots of demos by Justin
He did some 100% demos on nightmare:

• e1m1 in 1:16, one second better than the last demo on this level. This level has been improved about 10 times since Quake speed running began... The original time was 1:52.
• e1m2 in 1:22. This level has also been improved a lot. This is 14 seconds better than the last demo. I don't remember what the first time was, but I think it was over two minutes.
• e2m2 in 1:53, 37 seconds better than the old demo!
• e4m2 in 2:10. He says it was "pretty easy" to beat my old demo by 25 seconds...

and many runs on nightmare:

• e4m2 in :44, which is two seconds better than the time in QdQr!
• e4m4 in :27, a one second improvement over Yonatan's time.
• h1m2 in 1:06, 18 seconds better than Yonatan's time.
• h2m5 in :45, 14 seconds faster than Yonatan's time.
• h3m1 in 1:02, which is 8 seconds better than my old time. Justin forget that we already have a :57 for Scourge done Slick. [when will it be out? soon...]
• hdm1 in :29. Just one second better than Yonatan's old time. This level is just about optimized.
• r1m6 in 1:30. This is the first run on nightmare for this map. Only 15 seconds slower than the demo on easy.
• Four first time nightmare runs on Beyond Belief levels: bbelief2 in 0:20, bbelief3 in 1:08, bbelief4 in 0:23, and bbelief5 in 0:29.

and a few runs on easy skill:

• h1m4 in 1:01, two seconds better than Evan's demo.
• bbelief2 in 0:19, three seconds better than NoA-Simon's demo.
• bbelief4 in 0:22, two seconds better than Evan's demo.

Demos by me
Most of them are on r2m3 - Elemental Fury II. I did all four types!

• I did it in 2:27 with 100% on easy. This is one of my best demos so far, IMO.
• Then I did a run on easy in 1:37. Lots of rocket jumps here. Actually, all of the r2m3 demos have some rj's but this one has the most :)
• I got 1:56 for the nightmare run
• And 3:36 for the 100% on nightmare.
• I improved my 100% of e4m8 on easy by a minute and a half! The new time is 4:38.
• I improved my mexx9b demo by a lousy three seconds to get 2:52. I had hoped to improve it by more...
• I did a nightmare run of mexx9a in 2:18. There are a lot more monsters on nightmare than easy, and that made it rather difficult.

Some demos from Gunnar

• e1m1 in :29 on nightmare! He zigzags and wall hugs his way below the quite old time of :30.
• e1m2 in :36 on nightmare. One second better than his previous time, and two seconds better than the QdQr time.
• e1m4 in :33 on easy. 12 seconds better than the old demo by doing an ogre grenade jump. He's getting good at those...
• He made the first nightmare demo for PSE too... pse1 in :51.

Improvements from Evan

• He improved the run of e3m6 on easy by one second to get :40 by getting lots of help from vores...
• and he improved the run of e4m3 on nightmare by four seconds to get :54.

The amazing Will

• Will Marsh improved Yonatan's e1m3 run on nightmare by three seconds to get :31! This is four seconds faster that the demo in QdQr by Perkele, but he had to spend half a second picking up the health in the first room...

A new guy

• Lars Sundqvist has improved a demo that I thought was optimized. He improved the nightmare run of e1m7 by one second to get :37. He found a faster way of doing the trick that is unique to this level.

Coop demos
Gunnar and his friend Limbeck did a few coop demos:

• A run of e1m1 on easy in :26, one second better than the previous time.
• 100% of e1m1 on easy in :39, eight seconds better than the last time.
• And a 100% of e1m2 on easy in :40, 24 seconds less than the one player demo.

Will Marsh and Fred Fogarty also did some:

• A nightmare run of e1m1 in :28, one second better than Gunnar's new single player record.
• Both runs of e3m1. They got :30 on easy and :32 on nightmare. They use a new kind of trick in both...
• And a nightmare run of e2m1 in :09, the same time as the single player run.

Anssi Hyytiäinen and Jere Ranta did the first 100% coop on nightmare:

• e1m1 in :51. Quite good teamwork in this one.

Happy Watching
That's 42 new demos! You have a lot of watching to do. :)

Be sure to regually visit Speed Demos Archive, to be amazed by all the latest tricks that are discovered. Or you can think of your own tricks and send them in to sda@planetquake.com.